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The Unforgivable Sin in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

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 The Unforgivable Sin in Tennessee

Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

Michael Karounos
Trevecca Nazarene University

CRITICAL BACKGROUND

An exploration of the biblical basis underlying the fable of A Streetcar Named Desire

(1947) will reveal three key Christian concepts in the play: the imago Dei; a katabasis into

“desire” leading to a spiritual death; and the unforgivable sin which results in punishment.1 A

select review of the critical literature will preface the discussion of Williams's faith and the

evidence for a hermeneutical approach from a Christian perspective.

Before I make the case that—given Williams's many attestations of faith—a Christian

approach to Streetcar has been neglected, it may be of interest to briefly review how Streetcar

has been interpreted from the predominant streams of Freudian, Feminist, Queer, and African-

American perspectives. It bears emphasizing that my inclusion and framing of these arguments is

not to analyze or criticize them but to illustrate the distinction between theoretical and cultural

approaches and that taken here. To be clear, I am not suggesting that these are not valid

approaches but rather arguing for the value of including in the discussion a Christian reading that

deciphers the hard-coding of Williams's symbolism rooted in his well-known use of Christian

tropes.

Williams wrote most of his work during the peak Freudian-craze of mid-century so it is

not surprising that the most representative line of criticism in Williams in the 20th C. is probably

1
The imago Dei: (Genesis 1:26:27; James 3:9; Colossians 1:15); katabasis (1 Peter 4:6 and Ephesians 4:9) of
depraved desire leading to spiritual death (James 1:13-15; 3); the unforgivable sin (Matthew 12:31).

L&B 41.2 & 42.1 2021 & 2022

1 / Literature and Belief

Freudian. Gilbert Debusscher claims that Williams's emphasis on “the importance of sex” was

characteristic of “the emerging Freudian revolution of which the playwright was to become a

leading proponent on Broadway” (DeBusscher 168). Nancy Tischler notes that Williams lived

“in an era bombarded with the ideas of Freud” (Tischler, “Romantic Textures,” 160), and she

limns the Freudian Eros/Thanatos theme in his plays, observing: “Even the nymphomaniacs

(Cassandra in Battle of Angels and Blanche of A Streetcar Named Desire) realize that sex is little

more than a way of forgetting about death” (Tischler, “Distorted Mirror,” 395). Anne Fleche

claims that the “Freudian logic of lost beginnings” “objectifies Blanche and enables her to be

analyzed and confined as the embodiment of non-being” (Fleche). Writing from a perspective of

the film version, Nina Liebman likewise describes Blanche's sexuality from a Freudian

perspective, seeing her portrayals in film as a misogynistic application of Freud's Studies in

Hysteria: “In these madness films, women are punished with insanity for expressing their

desire…Thus Blanche is revealed as a woman of unnatural sexual drives--an exhibitionist, a

seducer of young boys, a bride of a sexual deviant…Blanche's sexuality is evil…” (Liebman 27,

30). The interpretation of the film Blanche is in fact identical to the critique of the stage Blanche

whose character critics panned for those very reasons.

Drawing on Anna Freud's theory of traumatology and Sigmund Freud's The Ego and The

Mechanisms of Defense, Joseph Silvio does a deep dig into the play from an interdisciplinary

perspective. He reflects on Blanche's disorders by way of psychoanalyzing Williams, soberly

observing: “He became an abusive alcoholic, a promiscuous unfaithful partner, a terrified

hypochondriac, a compulsive wanderer. He became Stanley, and he became Blanche, but he was

always trying to become Mitch and to find his own Stella” (Silvio 143). While Silvio's
2 / Literature and Belief

conclusion may be overreaching, his claim about the characters as archetypal representations of

themes originating in Williams's life has much biographical support.

Changing our focus to a queer perspective, Francisco Costa's analysis bears quoting at

length:

This gay male gaze redirects the heterosexual male/female dichotomy to the male body,

distorting the distinction heterosexual/homosexual, man/woman and active/passive.

…Williams places Stanley as object of gaze and desire, both straight and gay. This

erotization of Stanley's male body, if only paratextually, has a subversively queer force

that undermines the play's heteronormative model. (Costa 181)

Costa's observation is supported by Williams himself who Gore Vidal quotes as saying, “I cannot

write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire”

(Stories xxiii). That fact alone compels readers to look for the paratextual clues that Williams

employs, as in the “something” of the story “Something About Him” (1946); or by naming the

female character “Willie” in This Property Is Condemned (1946); or the dichotomous description

of Heavenly in the stage notes to Spring Storm (1937): “Her nature is confusing to herself and to

all who know her” (Spring Storm 3). In Williams, attractive young characters denominated “her”

usually means “him.”

Along a similar vein, John Clum has written extensively on gay subjects in theater and

literature and notes that “beautiful men, straight or gay, are erotic fantasies for Williams.” Clum

further notes, “In fifties dramas, very good looks are often a sign of homosexuality…Being too

good looking, thus being looked at, was a sign of being not totally masculine, thus homosexual”

(Clum 139, 135-136). In my own reading, I have found these characters to be coded with

signifiers as when Myra says of Val in Battle of Angels, “you're too good looking,” or Dick in
3 / Literature and Belief

Spring Storm who is described as being a “good-looking boy,” or Chance in Sweet Bird of Youth

who says, “I used to be the best-looking boy in this town.”2 Such “boys” are often paired with

an older “woman” (Blanche), thus reconfiguring the heteronormative type of the opposite sex in

any given situation.

John Bak looks at gender as performance, stating:

In other words, a woman's heterofeminist exterior (such as Blanche DuBois's in Streetcar

or Liling Song's in M. Butterfly) is in no way proof of her resultant heterosexual identity

since it is all just an act anyway; rather, her heterosexuality is a social assumption

resulting from her performing the necessary gender signs to assure such a reading, to

which her clothing greatly contributes. (Bak 96)

In a different manner than Bak suggests, an image of non-gendered figures in the Williams

oeuvre that defies “social assumption” occurs in the story “The Yellow Bird” (1947) where

“three figures of indeterminate sex” all ride astride a dolphin (Stories 228). Gender—whether it

is identified or “indeterminate”—is frequently multi-valenced in Williams and can often be read

metaphorically.

George Crandell makes the case that Stanley in Streetcar is a coded African-American

figure, writing “by means of a racialized discourse, linking a descendant of Polish immigrants

with imagery traditionally associated with black characters, Williams nevertheless covertly

broaches the topic of miscegenation in a play ostensibly without an Africanist presence”

(Crandell 345). Rachel Van Duyvenbode likewise sees Stanley as an encoded representative of

African-Americans, extending the argument into non-human metaphors of racialization:

2
Battle of Angels, 211; Spring Storm, 3; Sweet Bird of Youth, 166.
4 / Literature and Belief

The deployment of colour coding and the collapsing of human behaviour into animal

imagery can be found vividly in the depiction of Stanley in Streetcar. In Streetcar,

features of the racial other displace Stanley's whiteness, thereby confusing the boundaries

between racial and ethnic groups. (Van Duyvenbode 211)

In these essays, Williams is sometimes faulted for the lack of black characters in his

works, or for the diminished role that they play, or for an almost sub-human portrayal of them.

However, as is evident in stories like “Big, Black Idyll” (1931), written when he was only 20,

and “Desire and the Black Masseur” (1946), Williams was acutely sensitive to, and critical of,

racism in the South, purposely choosing the very stereotypes that Crandell and Duyvenbode find

problematic —big, menacing, sexual, violent, etc.—to portray racism in his own culture. Richard

Wright does the same thing in the powerful story “Big, Black, Good Man” (1957) whose

protagonist Wright variously describes as “black and vast and powerful,” a “black mass of

power,” a “devil of blackness,” and a “black beast.” Such counter-indicative descriptions are the

paratextual evidence of racism in the culture, not in the author.

*****

“Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image,

but Stella—my sister—there has been some progress since then!
Such things as art--as poetry and music—”
Blanche, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Maybe if I look hard enough into this fog I'll begin to see God's face...”
(Tennessee Williams in Tom 174)

I. The Image of God in the Three-Storied Universe

When Blanche states, “Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image…”

she is referencing a 3,500 year old Judeo-Christian doctrine in Genesis.3 As Professor of New

3
“Let Us make man in Our image, after our likeness.” Genesis 1:26, English Revised Version.
5 / Literature and Belief

Testament Studies David L. Turner emphasizes: “It would be difficult to overstate the centrality

of the image of God as a crucial theme in biblical theology” (Turner). The importance of the

theme would naturally be the subject of sermons that Williams heard as a child in his

grandfather's church. Similarly, when Williams himself writes “Maybe if I look hard enough into

this fog I'll begin to see God's face,” he is referencing the famous Pauline image: “For now we

see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face” (1 CO 13:12 ERV). Williams substitutes “fog” for

“mirror,” but the identical import of both statements communicates that the teleology of our lives

is hidden from us and that its revelation lies in seeing God's face. That he expressed himself as

he did reflects a biblical phrasing that only a Christian would use in conversation or even know

to use.

Thematically, the evidence for the Christian framing of Streetcar falls within Williams's

broad artistic use of Christian motifs. Nancy Tischler observes of Summer and Smoke (1948),

“Although both heaven and hell were part of his three-storied universe, they were romantic

interpretations of the medieval cosmology” (Tischler 160). Similarly, writing of Camino Real

(1953), Jan Balakian claims: “But even Elia Kazan, the director, and Williams himself were

confused about the play; neither realized that Camino was really a romantic pageant, with roots

in a medieval tradition” (Balakian 80). Thomas Adler's reading agrees with these general

observations of the Christian themes in Williams: “Although the categorization 'morality play'

has frequently implied a derogatory judgment…it can still be applied revealingly” to Summer

and Smoke (Adler 115).

These are astute observations, but they are puzzling in being general and not founded in a

specifically Christian analysis. The characterizations of Williams's dramaturgical architecture is

technically correct as regards the form—the “body” of the work, but as Jan Balakian's comment
6 / Literature and Belief

confirms, they attribute to Williams a motive that he did not have. Williams wasn't “confused.”

Portraying medieval cosmology was not his purpose, however analogous his drama might seem.

The argument here differentiates the textual “body” from the textual “spirit” of the work in a

manner similar to Philip Kolin's application of the erotic body in Williams: “Central to Barthes's

epistemology of erotic aesthetics is analogizing the text to the human body. 'Does the text have a

human form, is it figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our body? Yes, but of our erotic

body'“ (Kolin 290).

Consequently, my argument differentiates between Christian approaches by asserting that

while Streetcar is unavoidably like a morality play in that it portrays the soul's struggle for

salvation from a metaphorical hell, the textual, “spiritual” body of Williams's Christian motifs

exist independently of any literary genre and derive from his knowledge of the Bible. The motifs

do not self-consciously originate in a medieval model, as we find in Dante or in C.S. Lewis, but

from his earliest and life-long experiences as a Christian. The genre claims of a heaven/hell

theme moored to a morality play function separately from specifically biblical constructions such

as those I am emphasizing. The elements of descent, savior, and martyrdom are not uniquely

Christian and can be found in the pagan myth of Orpheus as sacrificial savior descending into

Hades, Christ-like, to recover Eurydike and being martyred. The interweaving of Christ and

Orphic archetypes is central to Orpheus Descending whose heavy-handed distortions of Christan

symbols caused the play to be closed in Boston. As Rory Egan explains about the title change

from Battle of Angels (1940) to Orpheus Descending (1957):

This, however, does not mean that the Christian element in the first play has been

replaced in the second by pagan tradition which was absent in the first. On the contrary,

once the second play has brought the Orphic content into the foreground, that element
7 / Literature and Belief

becomes more readily discernible, even obvious, in the first play as well, while the

Christian strain remains as strong, perhaps becomes even stronger... In both plays, in fact,

the Orphic and the Christian ingredients are inextricably interlaced” (Egan 63-64).

To a lesser extent, it is pagan and Christian elements that are “inextricably interlaced” in

Streetcar. Nonetheless, the general motifs of the Christian material in Streetcar overlaps two

separate Christian arguments of causality—those claiming the morality play model asserted by

Tischler, Balakian, and Egan, and the argument presented in this essay. The movement from

Belle Reve to Elysian Fields constitutes a Christian fall from grace to a purgatorial third “story”

based on the internal evidence of the play and stands independently of an argument based on an

extra-textual hypothesis of medieval cosmological models. Having said that, any conversation

that includes heaven, hell, purgatory, a journey down or up, necessarily can be compared to an

anagoge of the soul. The distinction I am making is that the likeness is incidental and hard-wired

into the Christian myth and that Williams did not write prescriptively according to Dante's

classic “four senses”: literal, tropological, allegorical, and anagogical (Dante).

What is without dispute in making these fine distinctions is that the Christian element is

undeniable. The presence of dozens (if not scores) of examples in the interviews, letters, and

memoirs makes the absence of discussion of Williams's faith puzzling considering how often he

professed belief in God and prayer. Even as he was being publicly excoriated for the gay content

that was becoming manifest in his work, his theological constructions present a coherent,

consistent, and compelling record of his faith.4 Drawing from the letters, he references God in a

reverent manner in at least eight letters on a wide variety of topics and refers to God more than

4
With the exception of the letter to Jay Laughlin, I only have the first two volumes of Williams letters which extend
to 1957, so there are likely many more such instances in the ensuing twenty-five years.
8 / Literature and Belief

fifty times in others.5 In point of fact, the importance of the Christ-motif to Williams is evident in

his overuse of it, writing to his editor that he had “Too many Christ figures in my work, too

cornily presented” (Tischler 156). Like Francisco Costa's emphasis on paratextuality concerning

representations of the physical body, and Barthe's analogue of the textual erotic body, the careful

reader must employ a similarly close reading of representations of the “spiritual” body in

Williams.

In addition to the textual evidence in Williams's letters, interviews, and memoirs, the

evidence for a strong Christian reading of the play rests on an amplitude of anecdotes. In his

biography, Lyle Leverich notes his grandparents effectively raised him and Rose for a few years

and the children became steeped in church culture and doctrine:

Growing up in a rectory during his formative years and regularly attending church and

Sunday school, Tom had instilled in him a love of God in heaven and a dread of

Judgment…He witnessed the examples of Christian tolerance, compassion, and duty in

his grandmother’s actions and heard them exalted in Grandfather’s sermons. (Tom 137)

Nancy Tischler adds some detail, observing that “The youthful hours Tom Williams

spent…reading the scripture passages, repeating the words of the services were not wasted”

(Tischler 159). Williams’s Christian belief, however nominal in form, persisted throughout his

5
The following representative quotes come from letters written between 1938 to 1954, when Williams was 27 until
age 43. In 1938 he thanks God for Rose's improved condition and that she is “not in any way revolting”(Letters Vol.
1, 139; in 1939, he prays may “God help” the WPA writers who had been fired (Letters Vol. 1, 179); in 1940, he
writes Joseph Hazan, “And so we come back to the word 'beauty—which I thank God is significant to us both”
(Letters Vol. 1, 275); in 1944, he closes a letter to New Directions founder Jay Laughlin with “God bless you!”
(Letters Vol. 1, 522); in 1948, concerning his parents' divorce, he expresses the prayer to Paul Bigelow “God help
her. God help them both” (Letters Vol. 1, 143); in 1953 he closes a letter to Audrey Wood with a comprehensive
prayer that would do any Christian credit: “Love to Liebling and to Bigelow, may God bless them, and Ida, may
God bless her, and Grandfather and 'Neesi' and Gadg [Elia Kazan] —may God bless them and keep them in good
health and spirits as I hope he will try to keep me” (Letters Vol. 2, 549); in 1954 he wrote to Elia Kazan “But God
has been with me, and you and Audrey and a bunch of people” (Letters Vol. 2, 490); and in 1954 he wrote an
unapologetic note to the critic at The Drama Editor who absurdly claimed that Streetcar had been “co-authored” by
Elia Kazan: “I acknowledge the greatness of Kazan's direction (and Thank God for it).” (Letters Vol. 2, 560).
9 / Literature and Belief

life as when he revealed in a 1958 interview that, “Every time I have a play opening, I close a

door on a certain room and kneel down and pray to God. And I very often receive an answer—in

fact, I’ve always received an answer” (Conversations 57). This testament of enduring faith is a

remarkable and not much publicized aspect of Williams that merits a closer reading, and one that

I believe strongly supports a reading of the play as being scripturally and not just thematically

Christian.

Knowing the full range and depth of Williams's Christian affiliation from his earliest

years until his death explains how integral it was to his craft. Tischler notes that as “a child of the

Church,” he “readily commingled aesthetic and religious mysticism, eroding barriers between art

and faith. His imagery of the Poet is frequently laced with references to Christ” (Tischler 155).

The mythos of the play is decidedly “commingled,” as are the characters. From a

Christian perspective, the other sense in which Blanche and Stella are “a long way from being

made in God's image” is in position. Before Blanche and Stella’s arrival at the two-flat in New

Orleans, they lived in a place that in the play assumes mythic proportion: Belle Reve, meaning

“beautiful dream” in French. In Nancy Tischler's schematic metaphor, Belle Reve is the top

“story” of heaven. The white house with white columns functions as an archetypal temple and it

has a biblical history memorialized by a testament of “thousands of papers, stretching over

hundreds of years” (Streetcar 490). Those papers are a scriptural record, a contractual witness of

broken trust by succeeding generations of the DuBois family.

Belle Reve’s history constructs an antebellum timeline with unmistakable covenantal and

transgressional associations. In an allusion to the biblical theme of Israel's unfaithfulness,

Blanche says it was lost because the “father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their

epic fornications,” (Streetcar 490). However, that is not quite true. It is Blanche who loses the
10 / Literature and Belief

mansion and her position in “heaven” because of her own “epic fornications,” which are, indeed,

noteworthy. Consequently, her loss of Belle Reve constitutes a “fall” from a mythic Christian

past, where she had once existed as an image of God, to an equally mythic Dionysian present of

drinking, dancing, and sexuality in Elysian Fields, the bottom story of the schematic that

represents a purgatorial locus of purification through suffering.

In Greek mythology, Elysian Fields is found in Hades. Allean Hale has compiled the

most complete record of Williams's early reading and she notes that “His early reading was wide

and deep,” “he knew the classics,” and “he often structured his plays with classical mythology in

mind” (Tischler and Hale). Edith Hamilton, in Mythology (1942), characterized Elysian Fields as

“a miserable dream” (Hamilton 43). Williams could certainly have read Hamilton’s book and it

would explain the precise dualism of the two “dreams”: one beautiful, one miserable; one

Christian, one pagan; one moral, one Dionysiac. The intermingling themes in Williams's work of

psychological, classical, and Christian elements have been noted in other works as well. Donald

Spoto writes of Battle of Angels that it is “intrigued with Christian symbolism, Dionysian myth,

Freudian motifs and D. H. Lawrence” (Spoto 109).

Blanche’s katabasis—her descent—in Streetcar as a Christian parable of the Fall

constructs semantic tiers of heaven, purgatory, and a middle world. “God’s image” may seem a

“long way” behind Blanche, but it is a time of recent memory, of a civilized, hierarchical

gentility. What Blanche finds when she arrives in Elysian Fields is that the imago Dei is

disfigured into what she calls “sub-human” in a memorable monologue discussing Stanley:

He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like

one! There's even something—sub-human—something not quite to the stage of humanity

yet! Yes, something—ape-like about him…Night falls and the other apes gather! There in
11 / Literature and Belief

the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His

poker night!—you call it—this party of apes! (Streetcar 510)

The cave reference elicits the idea of the subterranean domain of Elysian Fields, one of whose

chthonic gods is Dionysos. Stanley's dual role as Hades (abductor and “king” of Hades) and

Dionysos (drinker, sexual predator) adds mythic shade to the narrative. Keeping those details in

mind, the conflict between the Christian and pagan value systems is marked by the difference in

nature, conduct, and position between one made in “God's image” in Belle Reve and the “sub-

human” of Elysian Fields.

Blanche, in her post-Christian existence inhabits what Philip Kolin describes as a “paper

ontology” (Kolin, Modern Drama, 454). She has come to live a tenuous, symbolic existence full

of artificial signifiers—fake furs, fake jewelry, fake lovers. Like her paper lantern, her narrative

is a brightly-covered tissue concealing the truth. She possesses a fragile, trinitarian humanism of

art (paper lantern), poetry (Whitman), and music (the Varsouviana) that are the proxies for the

religious symbols, scriptures, and hymns of the old faith of the upper world. However, they

cannot survive in the distorted geometry of the lower world Elysian Fields as exemplified by the

sloping planes of Van Gogh's “The Night Café” (1888), by Stanley's invocation of sharply

pointed “re-bop” speech, and the discordant “blue piano” that constitutes the debased lower

world's trinitarian culture (Streetcar 492, 488, 492). Her hopeful reliance on “art, poetry, and

music” is subverted because the art, poetry, and music of the underworld must necessarily reflect

the values of that world, values whose associations of death, guilt, and loneliness Blanche

brought with her on her journey down. Like the paper lantern, she is torn apart and is forced to

reveal to herself and to others that she is not what she claims to be.

*****
12 / Literature and Belief

Blanche: [with faintly hysterical humor] They told me to take a streetcar

named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks
and get off at—Elysian Fields!

But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed

by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin;
and sin, when it has run its course, brings forth death.
James 1:15 (ASV)

II. The Demon of Desire

Blanche's hysteria at having transited from the white columns of Belle Reve to the sordid

surroundings of Elysian fields via conveyances named “Desire” and “Cemeteries” is

understandable. The word “desire” is fraught with meaning in the context of my argument that its

source derives from the passage in James. The Greek word epithumia occurs 38 times in the New

Testament and is translated variously as “lust,” “desire,” and even “concupiscence”

(“Epithumia”). The innocuous word “desire”—like the paper lantern—masks the etymological

reality of both the biblical and classical meanings of the term. In fact, it is not the exigencies of

the situation or some kind of bad luck that drags Blanche down to Elysian Fields but lust.

Blanche, not to put too fine a spin on her avocation, had become a whore. The biblical formula is

temptation leads to desire, desire leads to sin, and sin leads to death. Blanche's dialogue similarly

has desire leading to death. The logic, pattern, and diction link Blanche's speech to a singular

construction that is famously biblical. As with the reference to “God's image” and “God's face,”

such phrasing is uniquely biblical.

However, as we have seen with Williams, he also incorporates classical themes.

Epithumia constitutes half of the dialectical struggle in Plato's Allegory of the Charioteer in

which the soul drives a chariot pulled by two horses, epithumia (desire) and thumia (will). The

moral of the allegory is that if the soul is ruled by the horse of “desire,” it is pulled down to

earth. Strikingly, this is the same pattern we see with “desire” in the Epistle of James. Once
13 / Literature and Belief

fallen, the Platonic soul incarnates into one of nine kinds of people, in accordance with how

much truth the soul has “discerned”: “In her first birth…the soul that hath seen the most of being

shall enter into the human babe that shall grow into a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower

of the Muses and a lover...” (Plato 495). Interestingly, all three objectives describe Blanche who

loves beauty, the arts, and the finer aspects of romance, referring to Mitch's “gallantry” and

calling him, preposterously, “Rosenkavalier” (Streetcar 499, 520). Descending to the ninth and

lowest level of human incarnation is that of the “tyrant”: Stanley.

Intersecting the Christian and Platonic patterns of descent is the third variation on the

theme of the katabasis of desire in the play. Although Blanche refers jokingly to the nearby L&N

tracks as the “ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,” it provides Williams the opportunity to

reference Poe’s “Ulalume” (1847). In the poem, a “demon” of irrational desire leads the narrator

in a journey of descent against the soul's objections to a cemetery (e.g., “Cemeteries”), and

ultimately to death. For Blanche, that journey down is a katabasis navigated by her own demon

of desire, as when she tells Stella: “A man like that is someone to go out with--once--twice--

three times when the devil is in you” (Streetcar 509). In fact, Williams intended for this to be a

self-reflective statement, revealing in his memoirs that Blanche “was a demonic creature, the size

of her feeling was too great for her to contain without the escape of madness” (Memoirs 235).

The use of three different myths, exhibiting the same narrative and conceptual pattern, is

consistent with Williams's habitual, over-determined use of symbols in his works. In his

foreword to Camino Real, he writes, “I can't deny that I use a lot of those things called symbols

but…symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama” (Camino Real 745). In the foreword,

he mentions “archetypes,” “constructing another world,” “outside of time,” “allegory,” “fairy

tale,” “good and evil,” “painstaking design,” and “conscious attention to form” (Camino Real
14 / Literature and Belief

745-745). Thus, all three myths follow the same logic: desire leads to error (sin) leads to death.

What makes the Christian interpretation dominant over the Platonic and Poe's is that it provides a

conceptual landscape for each level of the three-storied hierarchy.

Blanche’s journey from Belle Reve begins in May and likewise ends in October, as in

Poe's poem, near a cemetery, a field of tombs. Here, as in Poe's poem, she confronts the memory

of a dead lover as the cause of her present position in the underworld of Elysian Fields. Blanche

tells Mitch that “DuBois” means “woods” and combined with “Blanche” means “white woods”

(Streetcar 499). There is a sense in which Blanch is self-encoded: she is the “white” ghoul—one

of Edith Hamilton’s “shadows”—who haunts herself through her actions. Read from the

template of a Christian or Platonic perspective, the pattern is consistent and portrays the downfall

of the soul. Read from the perspective of Williams's encoded structure using Poe's poem, the

pattern is conclusively identical.

Scene five represents the climax of Blanche's hopes. In response to Stella's question,

“Blanche, do you want him?” Blanche had desperately replied: “I want to rest! I want to breathe

quietly again! Yes—I want Mitch …very badly!” (Streetcar 517). Mitch gives her hope when he

says at the end of scene six, “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be—you

and me, Blanche?” Blanche exclaims: “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly!” (Streetcar 529).

This scene captures Blanche’s one redemptive possibility. In an insightful analysis, Bert Cardullo

explains that Mitch’s name is “derived from Michael, meaning ‘someone like God’ in Hebrew”

(Cardullo 34). Cardullo illuminates the most difficult syntactical problem in the play because the

statement makes no sense without the etymological explanation that is attributable to Williams’s

biblical knowledge. That apparent answer to prayer transforms Mitch “quickly” and surprisingly
15 / Literature and Belief

from a lower world “dancing bear” (Streetcar 500) into a possible savior, “someone like God”

whom Blanche wants “very badly.”

However, because of Stanley's intervention, Mitch fails to come to dinner on her

birthday. The realization that he learns about her past from Stanley drives Blanche to drink

heavily. Scene nine begins with her in full deshabille, wearing a sin-colored “scarlet satin robe,”

uncovered physically and morally. Mitch shows up, unshaven, in “uncouth apparel,” and also

drunk. He, too, is transformed by his own brutal desire and Blanche “looks fearfully” as “he

stalks into the bedroom” (Streetcar 542). To this point, “stalk” is a word reserved only for

Stanley, but Mitch reveals his predatory nature as a “bear” and violently rips the paper shade off

the light bulb. This first “rape” of the paper lantern foreshadows the scene in which Stanley rapes

Blanche.

Then, in perhaps the most revealing speech of the play illuminating her spiritual position,

Blanche’s memory revives when a Mexican woman outside the apartment cries “Flores para los

muertos.” Blanche muses: “Death—I used to sit here and she used to sit over there and death was

as close as you are…The opposite is desire. So do you wonder? How could you possibly

wonder?” (Streetcar 547). It is All Saints Eve—Halloween—and the woman is selling flowers

for the Day of the Dead when flowers are laid in petition at the Virgin Mary's feet. The holiday

coincides with All Saints and All Souls Day. Symbolically, the flowers are for Blanche whose

conscience has become “ghoul-haunted” by Allan Grey's ghost in Elysian Fields.

Scene ten shows Blanche a few hours later “drinking fairly steadily.” Her wardrobe

trunk, yawning like a grave, has flowered dresses strewn over it. Stanley, who has also been

drinking, enters and goes to the bedroom and “crouches” to find his pajamas. His shadow throws

a “grotesque and menacing form” on the wall (Streetcar 553). The overdetermined description of
16 / Literature and Belief

the shadow again echoes Hamilton’s Elysian Fields where, “the underworld is vague, a shadowy

place inhabited by shadows” (Hamilton 42).

Outside are heard “inhuman voices like cries in a jungle” (Streetcar 553). Blanche goes

to the window and watches in distress as she observes a sordid, lower world scene: a prostitute

has robbed a drunk; he pursues her; they struggle; a voracious vagabond “roots” through what

they left behind. The scene paints a picture of a fallen world in which there is neither redemption

nor escape, where it is safe neither inside nor outside.

Blanche picks up the phone and in an incoherent manner attempts to contact the outside

world. Like an animal with nowhere to go she cries out: “Help me! Caught in a trap. Caught—

Oh!” Stanley appears from the bathroom grinning lasciviously. The sound of the piano music

turns into the impending doom of an approaching locomotive and Blanche, uncovered and

unprotected, also “crouches” like an animal, connecting her linguistically to Stanley’s animal

nature just as Mitch was connected to Stanley by the word “stalks” in scene nine. Blanche,

driven to a desperate act of self-defense, breaks a bottle and threatens Stanley with it. The jagged

edge of the bottle completes the “cat” imagery as Stanley mocks her “Tiger—tiger!” (Streetcar

553-555).

Blanche’s unwilling transition into an animal dwelling among other animals is complete

with the rape scene. 6 Her brutal desire had brought her to a place where she is “trapped” with

brutes worse than herself, to a jungle where the human desire for companionship has been

degraded into an animal desire of predatory lust. This is the moment that Blanche—having

6
Williams portrayed the men as animals, referring to Mitch as a “bear”; to Steve, as a “goat”; and to Stanley,
variously, as “brute,” “sub-human,” “bestial,” “animal,” “howling,” “hound,” “whelp,” “ape,” “goat,” “pig, and
“swine.” Additionally, Stanley’s movements are animal-like: he “stalks,” he “crouches,” he moves “stealthily,” and
he “springs.”
17 / Literature and Belief

already lost “God's image”—also loses her human image and reaches the nadir of her journey by

becoming an animal herself.

*****

Blanche: “He implored my forgiveness. But some things are not forgivable.
Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing
in my opinion and it is the one thing of which I have never been guilty.”

Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy
against the Spirit shall not be forgiven.
Matthew 12:31

III. The Unforgivable Sin

Blanche's scriptural phrasing in the epigram above constitutes the basis of the

“unforgivable thing” as a theological reference to the famous exception of an “unforgivable” sin

found in Matthew 12:31, repeated in Mark 3:29, and alluded to in 1 John 5:16. The concept of an

“unforgivable sin” is a key text in Christian theology as it posits that blasphemy against the Holy

Spirit is the one sin that cannot be forgiven. In biblical times, “blasphemy” (“slander”) against

the king was a crime punishable by death. However, slander against other individuals also entails

the severest consequences as when Jesus states, ”that everyone who is angry with his brother

shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in

danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire”

(Matthew 5:28 ERV).

The three degrees of condemnation in that passage (judgment, council, hell) reflect the

three stages of Blanche's katabasis: moral judgment in the community; procedural justice by the

high school principal; and her temporal punishment in the extended, purgatorial “hell” whose

time begins with Blanche's prostitution at the Hotel Flamingo (if not earlier) and carries her into

Elysian Fields.
18 / Literature and Belief

Although Blanche forgives herself for losing Belle Reve, and even obliquely blames

Stella, she cannot forgive herself for what she did to Allan. It is in that sense that her sin is

“unforgivable,” resulting in a punishment that accords with the theology of a Christian purgatory

that employs a purifying “fire” (“Purgatory”). Williams codes her body and environment so that

she arrives “hot and tired and dirty”; hears the tamale man calling out “Red-hot!”; says, “I feel so

hot and frazzled”; is present when Stanley observe the temperature is “100 on the nose”; and is

raped by Stanley while a “hot trumpet” raises the temperature to a hellish extreme (Streetcar

474, 492, 494, 529, 555).

These may seem like random references, but it is the kind of diction that Williams uses in

his plays and stories to portray the lower story of his narratives, most obviously in The

Purification (1946) “I burned! I burned! I burned!” (Purification 50) and Auto-da-Fé (1946),

where Eloi says “Condemn it, I say, and purify it with fire!” (Auto-da-Fé 363). In Not About

Nightingales (1938), Williams portrays an actual event in which authorities locked striking

prisoners in a hot room lined with radiators and “four died from temperatures approaching 150

degrees” (Letters, Vol. 1, 135). In Orpheus Descending (1957), Lady cries out, “I guess my heart

knew that somebody must be coming to take me out of this hell!” (Orpheus 91). In The Night of

the Iguana, Shannon equates the setting in Mexico with Hell: “Why did I say 'tropical'? Hell!”

(Night 423). In Williams's plays and short stories, heat represents passion, purification, or

purgatorial persecution, and sometimes all three, as in Streetcar.

Blanche makes the speech about the “unforgivable thing” moments before she is raped by

Stanley, coding the rape as punishment for all her past sins of fornication, mendacity, profligacy,

and deliberate cruelty. She lies even as she says “I have never been guilty” because she has been

haunted all along by the memory of Allan Grey’s suicide from the moment she heard the fatal
19 / Literature and Belief

shot at the dance. She tells Mitch, “I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle—”

(Streetcar 546). But for Mitch it is the issue of her deceit that is unforgivable for him, just as

Allan Grey’s deceit was more than Blanche could forgive. With Mitch goes Blanche’s last

possibility of escape.

The idea of “deliberate cruelty” was a long-standing one in Williams's thinking and

occurs in at least three other places over the course of thirty-seven years that I have been able to

document. In 1936, Williams wrote in his journal about the behavior of his sister Rose in one of

her “neurotic sprees.” Williams thought it “disgusting” that she trailed “around the house in

negligees.” Guilt-stricken, he repented later and “asked God's forgiveness” (Letters, Vol. 1, 92).

On another occasion in 1937, he records his response after Rose tattled on him for partying with

his friends: “I went down the stairs as Rose was coming up them. We passed each other on the

landing and I turned upon her like a wildcat and I hissed at her: 'I hate the sight of your ugly old

face!” (likewise, Williams refers to Blanche as a “wildcat”). In the scene with Mitch, Blanche

reveals her identical sin of disgusted cruelty: “I saw! I know! You disgust me...” (Streetcar 529).

Finally, reflecting in his memoirs in 1973 he writes, “I have never blamed anyone for anything

but deliberate cruelty, for there has always been in me the conviction of Blanche, that 'deliberate

cruelty is the one unforgivable thing'” (Memoirs 122, 170). The convergence of Williams's

theological knowledge and his past transgressions climax in that key speech by Blanche.

Together, they comprise a confessional commentary on his own behavior and what he feels

constitutes a fatal transgression in relations.

Blanche's subsequent experience with the dying relatives, her innumerable love affairs,

her gross indiscretion with a student, her loss of Belle Reve, her prostitution, each succeeding sin

of desire and disaster drives her further down the path of self-destruction and away from “being
20 / Literature and Belief

made in God's image.” Like the locomotive that haunts her waking moments, an impending

sense of catastrophe follows her everywhere that no amount of dissipation could obliterate. The

moral consequence of her deliberate cruelty eventually places her in a position where others, like

Mitch, would be cruel to her.

In scene nine, when Mitch tears the paper lantern off the light bulb Blanche utters a

“frightened gasp” and tries to reassure herself: “Of course you don’t really mean to be insulting!”

(Streetcar 545). Mitch tries to force himself on her, rejects her desperate offer of marriage, and

storms out of the apartment, leaving Blanche to sink into an alcoholic abyss. That act of

deliberate cruelty by Mitch is what makes it possible for Stanley to complete Blanche’s

destruction with his own devastating brand of deliberate cruelty.

Nonetheless, for all their cruelty—physical, emotional, and psychological—neither

Stanley’s nor Mitch’s actions would have succeeded in completely demeaning Blanche's spiritual

nature had Stella remained by her side. Even at the end, when Blanche is clearly traumatized by

some event, Stella would not believe her. It is then that Stanley, impatient with the progress of

Blanche’s packing, strides into the bedroom and tears the paper lantern off the light bulb.

Blanche cries out “as if the lantern was herself” (a Barthesian coding reconfigured as “spiritual”

body) and Stella, unable to bear Stanley’s final cruelty, runs out to the balcony. This final

humiliation of Blanche is what breaks Stella’s reserve of denial and in her last speeches she

reveals an incriminating awareness of her own guilt that echoes the judgement of Cain: “Oh, my

God, Eunice help me! Don’t let them do that to her, don’t let them hurt her! Oh, God, oh, please

God, don’t hurt her!…What have I done to my sister? Oh, God, what have I done to my sister?”

(Streetcar 562).
21 / Literature and Belief

Stella’s epiphanic moment, her realization that hers is a Judas-act of betrayal, renders her

plea and her prayer ineffective, for she had admitted earlier that “I couldn’t believe her story and

go on living with Stanley” (Streetcar 556). Given a choice between caring for a sister who had

been brutally raped or remaining with the man who had raped her, Stella chooses to have

Blanche committed to an asylum, compounding every harm that Blanche has suffered until then.

Had Stella reacted with outrage toward Stanley and with love toward Blanche, had she moved

out of the apartment and taken Blanche with her, Blanche likely would have recovered. Perhaps

Mitch, moved by a sense of his own sin of cruelty, might have married Blanche and have taken

care of Stella and the baby as well. Perhaps, but in the underworld of Elysian Fields, Stanley

alone has the power to save or to condemn; no redemptive action is possible without his consent.

Earlier, Stanley had reminded Blanche and Stella that he is lord of Elysian Fields: “I am the king

around here, so don’t forget it!” (Streetcar 537).

At play's end, Stanley, Stella, and the baby form a fantastic tableau that replaces the

Christian trinity, and even replaces Blanche’s triune humanism of art, poetry, and music, with a

trio of fallen humanity. As Blanche walks away without a backward glance, Stella “cries out her

sister’s name from where she is crouched a few steps up on the stairs” (Streetcar 563). Stella

sobs with “inhuman abandon” as Stanley comes out. Gone with Blanche is every memory of

Belle Reve, of a better life, and what remains of Stella’s surrender is a bestial relationship

without beauty, without Blanche's “magic,” and, ultimately, without humanity. As Stella sobs,

Stanley makes a brutish attempt to give comfort by slipping his fingers through the “opening of

her blouse” (Streetcar 563). By this shockingly coarse image, Williams graphically demonstrates

the brutal base of their relations. When last seen, she is “crouched” outdoors like an animal,

huddled with Stanley on the porch of their broken world. However, unlike Blanche, they are
22 / Literature and Belief

incapable of realizing their world is “broken” in a spiritual or an aesthetic sense. They inhabit—

not so much a postmodern—as a posthuman world, a world inhabited by what Blanche correctly

identified as a “sub-human” species.

*****

Redemption

Williams’s comments on the ending are coyly indeterminate: “I have no idea what

happens to Blanche after the play ends. I know she was shattered. And the meaning of the play is

that this woman who was potentially a superior person…was broken by society” (Conversations

81). That information is something but not enough. We already know she is broken; the question

is, to what degree?

Based on her being taken to an asylum, an academic question is posed in the critical

literature as to whether Stanley's rape has driven Blanche insane. Jacqueline O'Connor compares

Blanche with other “madwomen” such as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie (O'Connor). Nina

Liebman observes that “Madness is the punishment for entering the male territory of expressive

desire” (Liebman 30, 31). On the other hand, Felicia Londre raises doubts: “Although most

critics seem to accept the premise that Blanche goes mad, it is possible to interpret…that she

finds a way to salvage her dignity” (Londre 61).

I think it is indisputable in the last scene that Blanche did “salvage her dignity.” She

walks out the door on the arm of the doctor who treated her like the lady she believed herself to

be. In theoretical terms, she did not retain a paper ontology. That illusion—her ultimate

punishment—was destroyed by Stanley by the actual and symbolic rapes. Nonetheless, although

Blanche is going to an asylum, Williams is not signifying insanity. Williams had spent time in an

asylum after his lover Frank Merlo’s death; his mother had spent time in an asylum (which she
23 / Literature and Belief

drolly informed Williams was a “horrible mistake”);7 and, of course, his poor sister Rose had

spent decades in asylums, suffering a lobotomy in the process. In an interview with Studs Terkel

in 1961, Williams expressed a hopeful epistemology: “I think people always find kindness. I

think even in asylums one can find kindness if one is willing to give it” (Conversations 81). As

with the fluidity of gender and the spiritual body in Williams's works, a character's “sanity” is

not to be read literally. In his memoirs he cautions readers about the fluidity of even sanity:

You have your own separate world and your own separate standards of sanity to go with

it. Most of you belong to something that offers a stabilizing influence: a family unit, a

defined social position, employment in an organization, a more secure habit of existence.

I live like a gypsy, I am a fugitive. No place seems tenable to me for long anymore, not

even my own skin. Sane and insane are legal terms. (Memoirs 247)

Like Williams, all of his protagonists are of “the fugitive kind,” hence the importance of

kindness from strangers. When the doctor arrives on the scene as the last actor in a happenstance

series of events, he finds a victim who has been mugged by life, so to speak, lying by the

wayside. When the matron suggests the violent coercion of a straight jacket, the doctor's

response is antithetical: “He takes off his hat and now he becomes personalized. The unhuman

quality goes. His voice is gentle and reassuring as he crosses to Blanche and crouches in front of

her” (Streetcar 563).

The doctor's palliative is kindness not confinement. Using a Christian double entendre,

Williams describes how the doctor “crosses to Blanche” and stoops to lift her to his level,

symbolizing her ascent. Like the Good Samaritan, he stops to help a fellow human being in the

7
Williams recounts in his memoirs how he received a phone call from her while he was vacationing in the Virgin
Islands. “Guess where I am?” “Why, Mother, aren't you at home?” “No, son. A horrible mistake has been made. I
have been put in a psychiatric ward. Please come at once and get me right out of here.” (Memoirs 116).
24 / Literature and Belief

only way it is possible to do so in those circumstances. The sudden display of gentility from the

doctor is the positive restorative that Williams gives to Blanche as a sign of future hopefulness in

her famous speech that echoes his later interview: “I have always depended on the kindness of

strangers” (Streetcar 563). It is that gesture that makes it possible for Blanche to turn her back on

Stella and Elysian Fields because she is leaving it and going to where people will be

institutionally kind to her. Institutional manners of class define the gentile code of the South and

the doctor's assumption of the gallant mode when he addresses her as “Miss DuBois” signals to

her that she will be among her own kind again. That her destination is an “asylum” constitutes a

step up from the purgatorial punishment of Elysian Fields and indicates a redemptive

movement—a trope in many of Williams's stories and plays—to the third “story” of Blanche's

journey.

The clues for redemptive moments in Williams are found in symbols of speech,

dramaturgical patterns, or set designs, as in Camino Real's three-storied layout, consisting of the

life of wealth, the life of poverty, and the life of fictive creativity. The setting of Camino Real

(1953) undisguisedly reflects Williams's diegetics that he spells out in the introduction. He

describes the characters as “mostly archetypes of certain basic attitudes and qualities with those

mutations that would occur if they had continued along the road to this hypothetical terminal

point” (Camino Real 743). The escape of Kilroy and Quixote, like Blanche's, is an archetypal

middle way to redemption that rejects the false dream life of “the luxury side of the street” (e.g.

Belle Reve), as well as the sordid reality of “Skid Row” (e.g. Elysian Fields), and chooses the

ascendant ideal of eros and art (Camino Real 749).

Consequently, in light of Williams’s comments about asylums, one should read

Blanche’s exit as the suggestion of an improved condition: the beginning of an anabasis to an

25 / Literature and Belief

alternate, life-giving world. While Blanche can never return to the upper story of Belle Reve or

to her former status as a teacher, her escape from the lower story of Elysian Fields is a

resurrection from the “miserable dream” of purgatorial suffering. In Blanche's case, a “horrible

mistake” has been made. Blanche is traumatized, not crazy. An argument can be made for her

being the sanest person in Elysian Fields by dint of her value system. Every character in

Streetcar has exhausted their possibility for growth and reached what Williams calls their

“hypothetical terminal point,” except Blanche.

Williams writes, “Blanche DuBois has a natural elegance, a love of the beautiful, a

romantic attitude toward life” (Conversations 45). For what it's worth, the construction of natural

elegance, love of the beautiful, and romantic attitude aligns with Plato's tripartite description of

the highest level of human who is “a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower of the Muses and

a lover...” (Plato 495). Williams's dramaturgical architecture of heaven, purgatory, and a final

return to normalcy are evident in Blanche's speech:

Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella—my sister—there

has been some progress since then! Such things as art –as poetry and music—such kinds

of new light have come into the world since then!...In this dark march toward whatever it

is we're approaching…Don't—don't hang back with the brutes! (Streetcar 511).

Although Blanche's past behavior positions her a long way from the imago Dei, she did not hang

back with the brutes. She fell from an upper story ontology of being made in “God's image” to an

aesthetic existentialism of “art…poetry and music.” Those things could not save her in Elysian

Fields. Nonetheless, at play's end Blanche retains the aesthetic components of a beautiful world

in her dress, bearing, and mode of speech. The essential elements of her person are affirmed; it is

the “reality” of Elysian Fields that is insane, much in the same way that Robert Pirsig in Zen and
26 / Literature and Belief

the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) critiques the received narrative of Phaedrus' reality:

“The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of

this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane” (Zen 361).

Blanche had rejected the “forms” of both Belle Reve and Elysian Fields. Her existential

modality of “Quality”—art, poetry, and music—can only survive in a world of like creatives who

affirm not only her cultural values but the type of person she is, a type that could not survive in

the alternate two stories that society offers in either wealth or poverty.

Williams reflects on the conflict between his characters and their society, writing: “I

hadn’t thought of them as being hopeless. That’s not really what I was writing about. It’s human

valor that moves me. The one dominant theme in most of my writings, the most magnificent

thing in all human nature, is valor” (Conversations 14). The essence of modern tragedy is not a

hopeless fall into oblivion through sin but a struggle against overwhelming odds.

Bert Cardullo characterizes Blanche's katabasis as a “Christian tragedy” (Cardullo 91). I

agree that it is Christian but not a tragedy in a conventional sense about a person. Rather, it is the

tragedy of a type. As an individual, Blanche is not tragic like Antigone, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear,

Macbeth, or Othello. Those characters do not survive their fatal flaws and subsequent ordeals.

Blanche is also not tragic like Willie in Death of a Salesman (1949) or Jim in Long Day's

Journey into Night (1956). It is interesting that both those works benefit formally from the

precedent of Streetcar but not from its redemptive moral. Blanche, like Nora in A Doll's House,

survives her ordeal. She has the “valor” to transcend her Prufrockian moment of crisis. She

descends to the underworld, survives its monsters, and ascends from her purgatorial trial to a

middle world of normalcy where sanity and insanity at least have legal definitions and
27 / Literature and Belief

boundaries of behavior. In the end, Blanche accomplishes a Christian redemption through

suffering.

Reading the structure of A Streetcar Named Desire through the play's biblical devices

sheds light on the unique scriptural diction (“unforgivable thing”), trinitarian patterning (“art,

poetry, and music”), archetypal Christian symbolism (heaven/hell), and, most importantly, in the

theological process described in the Epistle of James in which temptation leads to an

unforgivable sin which results in a spiritual death. Although Blanche's transformation into a

“wild-cat” transfigures her imago Dei into a beast that preys on children, she is ultimately saved

from herself and her purgatorial fate by the doctor who “crosses” her path to redeem her like a

savior.

When Streetcar appeared in 1947, God had been dead for half a century, two world wars

had killed millions of people, and the world had suffered a devastating economic depression.

Modernism's progress from “being made in God's image” to hopeful teleologies of Darwinism,

Marxism, and Freudian solutions had been exhausted. The literature of mid-century was a

literature of despair and nausée. Characters in fiction committed suicide, became addicted, or

went mad, as did some of their authors. What is called Williams's romantic vision is actually

Williams's eschatological Christian optimism. In a world where the material alternatives of

wealth and poverty are equally soul-crushing, Blanche's salvation—and, by extension, the

salvation of all the archetypal Blanches inhabiting the “broken world” of Hart Crane's epigram—

is Williams's message in the play. The latent Christianity of Streetcar that has for seventy-odd

years eluded critical evaluation expresses itself as a ringing vehicle of hope filtered through

salvific analogs of art, poetry, and music.

28 / Literature and Belief

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Wright, Richard. “Big, Black, Good Man.” In The American Tradition in Literature.

New York, NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1974.

 31 / Literature and Belief

Tennessee Williams Bibliography

Williams, Tennessee. Plays: 1937-1955, Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 2000.

_____. A Streetcar Named Desire. In Plays: 1937-1955, Vol. 1. New York: Library of America,

2000.

_____. Auto-da-Fé. In Plays: 1937-1955, Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 2000.

_____. Battle of Angels. In Plays: 1937-1955, Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 2000.

_____. Camino Real. In Plays: 1937-1955, Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 2000.

_____. Not About Nightingales. In Plays: 1937-1955, Vol. 1. New York: Library of America,

2000.

_____. Spring Storm. In Plays: 1937-1955, Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 2000.

_____. The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. In Plays: 1957-1980, Vol. 2. New York: Library of

America, 2000.

_____. The Night of the Iguana. In Plays: 1957-1980, Vol. 2. New York: Library of America,

2000.

_____. The Purification. In 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. New York: New Directions, 1966.

_____. “The Yellow Bird.” In Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories. New York: New

Directions Pub., 1994.

_____. Tennessee Williams: Memoirs. New York: New Directions Pub., 2006.

_____. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 1: 1920-1945. Edited by Albert J.

Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New York: New Directions Pub., 2000.

_____. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 2: 1945-1957. Edited by Albert J.

Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New York: New Directions Pub., 2004.

_____. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. Vol. 1. New York, NY: New Directions, 1971.

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